Related papers: Rusty Flying Robots: Learning a Full Robotics Stac…
Although robotics courses are well established in higher education, the courses often focus on theory and sometimes lack the systematic coverage of the techniques involved in developing, deploying, and applying software to real hardware.…
Current Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms struggle with long-horizon tasks where time can be wasted exploring dead ends and task progress may be easily reversed. We develop the SPOT framework, which explores within action safety zones,…
Learning-based methods, particularly Reinforcement Learning (RL), hold great promise for streamlining deployment, enhancing performance, and achieving generalization in the control of autonomous multirotor aerial vehicles. Deep RL has been…
In the evolving landscape of education, robotics has emerged as a powerful tool for fostering creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills among students of all ages. This innovative approach to learning seamlessly integrates…
Simulators play a critical role in aerial robotics both in and out of the classroom. We present RotorPy, a simulation environment written entirely in Python intentionally designed to be a lightweight and accessible tool for robotics…
Recently, there has been much progress in the formulation and implementation of methods for generic many-particle simulations. These models, however, typically either do not utilize shared memory hardware or do not guarantee data-race…
Data plane programming enables the programmability of network devices with domain-specific programming languages, like P4. One commonly used P4-programmable hardware target is the Intel Tofino switching ASIC. The runtime behavior of an…
Rust is a modern programming language that guarantees memory safety and the absence of data races with a strong type system. We present RustyDL, a program logic for Rust, as a foundation for an auto-interactive, deductive verification tool…
The Michigan Robotics MBot is a low-cost mobile robot platform that has been used to train over 1,400 students in autonomous navigation since 2014 at the University of Michigan and our collaborating colleges. The MBot platform was designed…
We present Scratchy---a modular, lightweight robot built for low budget competition attendances. Its base is mainly built with standard 4040 aluminium profiles and the robot is driven by four mecanum wheels on brushless DC motors. In…
Rust is gaining popularity for its well-known memory safety guarantees and high performance, distinguishing it from C/C++ and JVM-based languages. Its compiler, rustc, enforces these guarantees through specialized mechanisms such as trait…
Unmanned aerial vehicles are rapidly transforming multiple applications, from agricultural and infrastructure monitoring to logistics and defense. Introducing greater autonomy to these systems can simultaneously make them more effective as…
In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in converting C code to Rust, to benefit from the memory and thread safety guarantees of Rust. C2Rust is a rule-based system that can automatically convert C code to functionally identical…
Rust is a popular programming language in building various low-level software in recent years. It aims to provide safe concurrency when implementing multi-threaded software through a suite of compiler checking rules. Unfortunately, there is…
Large-scale training have propelled significant progress in various sub-fields of AI such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, building robot learning systems at a comparable scale remains challenging. To develop…
This investigation introduces a novel deep reinforcement learning-based suite to control floating platforms in both simulated and real-world environments. Floating platforms serve as versatile test-beds to emulate micro-gravity environments…
We describe our experience teaching an intensive capstone course in which pairs of students build the hardware and software for a remote-controller quad-rotor aircraft (i.e., a quadcopter or "drone") from scratch in one 10-week quarter. The…
Seven years ago (2016), we began integrating Robotics into our Computer Science curriculum. This paper explores the mission, initial goals and objectives, specific choices we made along the way, and why and outcomes. Of course, we were not…
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) mark a major shift in robot learning. They replace specialized architectures and task-tailored components of expert policies with large-scale data collection and setup-specific fine-tuning. In this…
The wide use of robotic systems contributed to developing robotic software highly coupled to the hardware platform running the robotic system. Due to increased maintenance cost or changing business priorities, the robotic hardware is…